fifteen - Conclusions: social transitions and biographical work

Summary

This volume's introduction asked how we can come to understand the complex and rapidly changing societies of today, and what such new understanding implies for social policy. Now, from the thick texture of the case studies, we can draw together some more general conclusions concerning emergent gender, class, intercultural and intergenerational relations. We can ask more grounded questions:

• • What the biographies imply for the future of the European project.

• • What they suggest about the ‘nature of the epoch’ at the turn of the millennium.

• • How biographical methods might contribute to a movement for change within (comparative) social policy.

We invite you to join us in thinking about these questions. The core chapters of this volume have made a number of comparisons between cases, and offered some suggestions on policy issues. However, they have by no means exhausted the process. There is no end to case comparison, since each comparison draws out different issues, as will a reader's own experiences and reflections.

This chapter is made up of two parts. The first reflects initially on some key terms of debate, and on the historical ‘moment’ in which Sostris was conducted. It is mainly concerned with the extent and patterns of social transformation that are revealed by the interviews, and how these burst out beyond the key categorisations of conventional social policy. The second part, drawing on policy proposals from the earlier chapters, constructs a profile of supportive social interventions, and discusses their implications for training and organisational settings. It considers signs of support for such ‘utopian’ thinking, and prospects for the social model of welfare given the strength of contrary indications at the economic level.

The extent of social change

Framing the issue

Our initial focus was on ‘individualisation’ and ‘risk’, rather than social exclusion, despite this being the title of the EU programme under which our research was funded. Reviewing how social exclusion had entered social science discourse in the seven countries studied, we found that many social scientists had resisted the term. Some argued that it “located at the margins” what belonged at the centre of society, and bore the usual dangers of pathologising poverty. Some preferred the term ‘precarity’, a broader concept that also indicated the need for preventive measures. In fact, as a mainstream term, social exclusion has gathered about it considerable sophistication (Sostris, 1997; Levitas, 1998; Askonas and Stewart, 2000)